A bit late to the party, but since there's new information on the game I don't feel too bad about it.
I was in on the beta for Drakensang Online, and played it off and on for a number of years until late last year when I hit a spot I couldn't advance past and just stopped playing.
Now the ONLY thing Drakensang about the game is the name. Bigpoint only bought the rights to the name so don't go in game expecting anything Dark Eye.
Drakensang Online is a standard hack and slash game or as I call them a 'wack a mole' type game. It's gone through some different phases over the years after starting out as a pretty restrictive F2p game. I can't remember if you only had X number of lives a day or what it was, but you could only play for a bit before you needed to spend money to continue that day. So the F2p playstyle was, play for a couple of hours and then stop and pick it up the next day.
Thankfully it's become more and more F2p over the years to the point you could play it totally free if you wanted to. It is very much a P2W game especially in the PvP area, but as long as you stay away from that, like I; said totally free.
One of the early things I liked about the game was instead of having quest markers on the map, you had to explore a bit to find where to go. The first step was paying attention to the quest dialogue which would have something like 'We think there's a witch living in the old Jones house, go and check it out. You can find the house by following the road north out of town and when the road bends by the big rock, keep going north, than turn left at the stream and you'll see the house a bit off to your right when you get up on the raise'. Sadly too many thought this made the game 'too hard' and they went to quest markers on the map.
New Information:
The game is now on STEAM (listed as early access). From the thread posts most seem to feel that move was made because the game was dying and it was a last ditch effort to attract new players. Steam Charts show 0 players in the past 30 days so that's not a good sign and it seems porting it over to steam introduced a lot of bugs into it, including not being able to log in with your old Drakensang Online account while using steam.
(just as an aside; Drakensang: The Dark Eye is still showing active users (16 in the past 30 days!)